Xbox One Game Trials Arrive For Digital Downloads

One of the more praised features of the Xbox 360 was allowing users to taste a game with a limited trial of the full version, and if they liked it they had the option of unlocking the full thing right then and right there by purchasing the digital copy. Seems like a great way to entice users while they're engaged with the game right? Well, Microsoft finally decided to adopt that feature for the Xbox One and it'll also be arriving for ID@Xbox indie titles, too.

The news comes courtesy of a recent interview that Eurogamer conducted with the head of the ID@Xbox program, Chris Charla. The program is designed to help indie devs get their games registered under Microsoft and a doorway opened for studios without publishers to put their content onto the platform.

Well, Charla wants to take that concept a step further and opened the door even further for what are called game trials – a feature that was available on the Xbox 360, which enabled developers and publishers to put up games that would be available for users to download. Once downloaded, gamers would have a limited amount of time with the game – very similar to a typical demo – only that when the trial ended, players had the option to continue playing by simply purchasing the full game.

Chris wanted this feature on the Xbox One to help expand the system's software engagement, saying...

“When Xbox One launched you could do game demos and you could do games. But we didn’t have the functionality that was on Xbox 360 – that ‘trial’ experience where you could download a demo and then convert it [to a full version],”

“But now we do. In the same way that we update the Xbox One OS every month, they update the development system every month – or regularly, anyway. So that’s something that we recently turned on. I don’t think we’ve seen any ID@Xbox games yet that have shipped with trials, but we may well in the future. It’s something that’s open to everybody.”

The console currently has over 250 developers registered to make games on the Xbox One, but very few of them are making the jump to the release status. As they slowly roll out, having them add a trial version of the game so users can quickly and easily purchase them, will easily add to the appeal of buying digital games for the Xbox One.

As for finding and getting these games, Charla doesn't expect any software segregation to come into play, saying...

"They won't be segregated in any way at all.”... "Saying that, we have had a lot of player requests for some way to specifically find the ID@Xbox games,"..."so we have talked about adding some functionality so that people can do a search for just the ID@Xbox games.”

Not bad.

At least the company is now moving toward providing more content and video games on a system that was supposed to be designed for gaming from the start.